Fad or relevant?
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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If I had to take a wild guess giving benefit of the doubt it checks the total bytes downloaded and CPU usage to estimate electricity usage.
With a combination of checking which data centers its hosted out of and if they are using certified renewable energy etc
Yes it checks whether the data centers bought their green, green washed, or green washed plus premium package.
That tells us almost nothing about a website's carbon impact. I could serve a 4k uhd movie from my personal website and it wouldn't even be 1% of the impact from Reddit for 1 second. We need to know how much traffic a site gets for those numbers to matter.
While I understand and agree with you, the obvious counterargument is how many people get serviced and the generated value of them being served. I mean people won't argue that a car is better than a bus because the car produces less carbon. What I think is the better way to highlight the ridiculousness of those icons, a newspaper website produces more carbon (if energy source is producing carbon) than a server that just return the certification icon. So newspaper website is worse? That is how this certification works... Low information density gets rewarded. Which is contra productive if the goal is an energy efficient web.
To be fair, the service in the screenshot, tries to estimate the average carbon over the year and collects data to improve estimated that counter some of my critic, but it doesn't fix the ignorance to the kind of data provided and rewards low data density to some degree